Privacy policy & cookies

Privacy policy

The RCOG is committed to protecting your privacy. The following statement tells you how we collect, store and manage personal information online to comply with the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998. You can also read the College’s full data protection policy. If you have any queries about how the College collects, stores or manages your personal information, please contact the College Archivist on archives@rcog.org.uk or by writing to Archives, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, 27 Sussex Place, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4RG, UK.

How does the College collect information?

We ask you to register in order to access some sections of the website and carry out certain transactions through the site. For non-members we ask for your name, email address and postal address. For Fellows, Members and Trainees we require your name, email address, membership number and postal address.

How does the College use this information?

We use your personal information to provide the information, services and products you have requested as well as for administrative purposes.

Sometimes we may want to share your information with carefully selected third parties. When we collect your information, we will ask you if you want us to do this or not. Whatever you decide, you can change your mind at any time by contacting us at the address above.

We may also need to disclose your information if required to do so by law.

Does the College use cookies?

We may also store information about you using cookies. These are files which are sent by us to your computer which we can access when you visit our site in future. We do this for a number of reasons including administering the site’s registration system and shopping cart. Cookies cannot be used by themselves to identify you or transmit personal information.

Information on controlling cookies is available at www.aboutcookies.org. Please note that by deleting our cookies or disabling future cookies you may not be able to access certain areas or features of our site.

How does the College protect personal information?

We use a secure server when you enter into a money transaction from our website. We also encrypt your credit card number at the time when you place your order.

We take appropriate measures to ensure that the information you give us is kept secure, accurate and up to date. We will only keep it for as long as is necessary for the purpose for which it is used.

How do I change the information the College holds on me?

If your personal details change, please help us to keep your information up to date by going to My Profile and updating your details.

Can I see the information the College holds on me?

You have the right to ask for a copy of the information we hold about you (for which we will charge a small administration fee) and to have any inaccuracies in your information corrected. To submit a request, please contact the College Archivist on archives@rcog.org.uk or by writing to Archives, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, 27 Sussex Place, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4RG, UK.

Cookies

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on the software you’re using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies, we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site, you can learn how to do this below; however, doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

More about our cookies

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

Making our shopping basket and checkout work

Providing access to your CPD/Revalidation ePortfolio

Determining if you are logged in or not

Allowing you to add comments to our site

Other membership benefits, including access to online journals, TOG and BJOG

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third-party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:

A widget from Twitter

A link to the College’s Facebook page

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.

Anonymous visitor statistics cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics, such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows, which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These ‘analytics’ programs also tell us, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before, helping us to put more money into developing our services for you, rather than marketing.

We use:

Google Analytics

Turning cookies off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. However, doing so will likely limit the functionality of our and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.

For more information about turning off cookies on your browser, click the relevant link below:

PC or Mac browsers

Mobile browsers

It may be that your concerns around cookies relate to so called ‘spyware’. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.